Yeah, guess what, "champ..." A great many among the PRO-W crowd have a problem with it too, both on this board and in Congress. Look up the "Privacy is Unpatriotic" thread from around the time Patriot II was proposed. This isn't a right-left fight. Many people from both sides find this legislation very troubling.
I love the sentiment here, but let's be pragmatic: he was talking about muskets not bombs or biochemical weapons. Wouldn't that make a terrific difference?
Lil' Texxx your the only one talking about homework, keep working you'll find a lady who won't go running out of your bedroom.
While I don't agree with the folks in Arcata, they are doing us all a favor. Whether you are for or against the Patriot Act, you should never be afraid of a public debate concerning its merits. Let the arguments begin.
How? Because the threat being possibly applied to larger numbers at once should somehow redefine our priorities? Principles are all fine and well until the potential body count rises above a certain number, and then they get shelved? Besides, the people who pose the larger threat BF was alluding to also now how greater weapons at their disposal than they did at the time he was writing. Not that either of these facts take away from his central point: Sacrifice your liberties for freedom, and all you've done is make yourself more like those you oppose in order to feel safer.
It's pointless to live your life in fear. Your odds of dying an unnatural death from a cause other than terrorist action are astronomically higher than getting blown up by a suicide bomber. Realistically, none of these laws do much to prevent terrorism. Tim McVeigh blew up a lot of people working mostly by himself. Ironically, instituting stricter laws and reducing personal freedoms has the effect of possibly moving more domestic fringe groups into the realms of terrorist action. I didn't know anyone personally who lost someone on 9/11 but, statistically speaking, chances are most people in America didn't know anyone there either. It's a stupid law, based on a stupid argument, written for stupid people.
The founders were also speaking of muskets (not automatics and machine guns) when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, but somehow I don't think you'd use that reasoning to remove the right to bear arms from our Constitution. Also, we could ban automobiles tomorrow and save thousands of lives, but would the loss of freedom be worth it?
Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. The Patriot Act needs to be repealed before any damage is done. If ONE person's civil liberties are violated by this law, that is too many. So illegal search and seizure and sentencing without trial. Ya, no thanks. That ain't America, pal. You've been watching too much '24'. We can protect the country without further violating the rights of our citizens. It's this knee-jerk, the-sky-is-falling reaction that those who think they know what's best for you want you to believe. Bottom line is this, if the government can spy on me without just cause, can imprison me for what I think, or worse what they think I think, and we have no legal recourse to stop it, what is the point of elections? It's controlled paranoia. Sustain, re-elect, repeat.
Well, if we outlawed guns, cars, knives, etc, we could save thousands of lives. I doubt you'd be ready to jump behind those causes.
Isn't this really the crux of the biscuit? The gov't has to show probable cause to 'force' locals to reveal their citizenry's secrets. Should a local community be against the act, isn't the judicial system an IN PLACE governor against the FEDS supposed bad intentions? Isn't the judicial system how we protect ourselves against everything from tyranny to invasion of privacy by the Feds? I'm a political ignorant, but the hully gully of local interest groups is just so much Ricky Lake-like noize, overlooking that the judicial system has, is, and will protect the locals from THE MAN, should they desire that to happen. What am I missing? Somebody straighten me out.
When the feds can bypass the judicial system, it's no longer an effective means of protecting your rights. To fight the judicial system you have to have a lot of money to pay for court costs and to pay for a lawyer with talent. So private citizens can fight laws that they hate the same way corporations do. Just throw millions at the problem, donate to the right senators, and POOF! the law goes away.
Well, until I see the same story from a respected source.... No, I believe you. But, this just makes me upset about the incompetence of the government in handling the matter, not that they shouldn't have been allowed to investigate a pretty serious lead. As far as I know, the Patriot Act doesn't permit the use of excessive force. That's a whole other problem. Apparently the computer use was eventually traced to Mohammed Atta himself, so it must have been used to do relay some pretty serious information. I assume the Patriot Act would come into play when they were trying to trace the information back to it's source (ie, Kinko's). This is just my opinion. If the government knows that an email was sent that contained serious information relating to terrorism, they should have all the means neccesary to try and determine where that message originated from and by whom. I assume it's your opinion that the government should not be allowed to have access to that information? Ya know, just shrug their shoulders and dismiss it?
The government had all the power to get the data in hand to prevent the 9/11 attacks, they just didn't utilize it. They had Moussaoui in custody but (HQ, local agents wanted it) decided *not* to seek the national security search warrant to look at his computer's contents - may be because the FBI didn't want to offend the large Muslim communities (voting block) in Michigan and Florida... What's the worst "horror" story? http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/ins_detainess021224.html http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021220-121218-9776r.htm Sort of discourages legal immigrants from complying when we pull stunts like that. Before 9/11 the INS regularly held some non legal immigrant folks for years in jail without a hearing or due process. The least we could do is expel them to their home country or charge em with whatever they did wrong and sentence them. Is suspending habeas corpus a horror story? http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,58382,00.html This is one of forty four American citizens. Are they guilty? Are they terrorists? Better to lock them up forever than take the chance I take it. Why does John Walker Lindh get a trial with charges and these guys don't? Not to mention the harrassment Sikhs have to undergo from culturally ignorant Americans.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/nj/taylor2003-03-18.htm There are asides to specific articles in the New York Times, but they've been wrong before (on pre 9/11 stuff...), and I didn't do a search on NYT to verify the data.
God forbid we put people who break the law in a situation where they "felt like a criminal." Hurry up and let everyone out of prison now please, Uncle Sam. It says that he was detained as a material witness. It is my understanding that the court must only show why someone is detained when presented with a writ of habeus corpus. Having shown the reason, this should be a non-issue.
Criminals should be in prison or expelled if non citizens. I can't believe you got something else out of that. If we want to arrest folks for noncompliance, go out and get them. We aren't getting any terrorists this way. Did you read the full text of any of those links? All of the reasons for keeping Hawash in custody are a national security secret and sealed. I stole this from the freeemikehawash website: Hawash is a flight risk? Hawash has a job, a home, a family, and deep roots in his community. "Material witness" arrests are solely for grand-jury or trial witnesses who are either a "flight risk" or represent a "danger" to the community, until now. Excerpted from one of the articles: But under current law, innocent suspects caught up in the war against terrorism will get no help at all from the courts if they are foreign nationals captured and detained abroad. That is the lesson of the March 11 decision in Al Odah v. U.S., which dismissed three lawsuits by family members seeking the release of 12 Guantanamo detainees from Kuwait, two from Britain, and two from Australia. The Kuwaiti lawsuit argued that the 12 were not combatants but charity workers who had been seized by Pakistani bounty hunters and sold to U.S. forces. The evidence of their noncombatant status has been deemed credible by high-level Kuwaiti officials and some journalists. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit nonetheless ruled that none of the detainees has any right to seek judicial relief, under any circumstances. No court in this country has jurisdiction," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel, because "aliens detained outside the sovereign territory of the United States" are not protected by the Constitution. This appears to be a correct application of a 1950 Supreme Court precedent, Johnson v. Eisentrager. More debatably, Judge Randolph also held that Guantanamo was outside U.S. "sovereign territory" because Cuba technically retains sovereignty. That case is ridiculous.
<b>MacBeth</b> and <b>subtomic</b>: No denying it's a slippery slope, but yes there is a point where we have to call halt and it is reasonably arbitrary and never will everyone agree on it. We need to settle somewhere between muskets and AK-47s. Why not just do away with the immigration laws if we want liberty? Now that would be a mess and no one would feel safe. I think there are very few absolute principles; there may be some but they are few... if any. Our inherent and inalienable right to freedom is abridged daily by petty laws which limit our behavior. I have never owned a weapon in my life. I understand the premise of the second amendment and I think that people go overboard with it, but I have to wonder what the gun control laws in Iraq were and how that affected Saddam's grip opn those people.
From the news reports they make it sound as though almost every business owner/middle class family has an AK-47 for self protection. It didn't affect Saddam's grip on power, though, there were so many people working for the regime and the repercussions for speaking out so harsh.
